Listen to What the Flower People Say, 40 Years After That Famous San
Francisco Summer

SUMMER OF LOVE

"American Experience" documentary. Directed, written and produced by
Gail Dolgin and Vicente Franco. 9 p.m. Monday, KQED.

That summer, although it started earlier than that and ended too soon,
came and went four decades ago. Some say it changed American culture.
Those who believe that also believe the change was for the better.
Others think it was just a blip and, in the end, signified nothing
other than the old ennui, fueled by drugs and misplaced idealism.

This is the 40th anniversary of the fabled Summer of Love in San
Francisco, ground zero for the '60s counterculture and the subject of
a mildly interesting "American Experience" documentary by Bay Area
filmmakers Gail Dolgin and Vicente Franco, airing Monday night on PBS.

For those who were there or who were part of the generation watching
events from elsewhere in the country, the film will probably feel like
a kind of postcard from the past. Fortunately for the filmmakers, the
"Summer of Love" was exhaustively chronicled by national and local
publications, including The Chronicle, which contributed material for
the film, and local TV stations, who recorded everything from the
Human Be-in in January of '67 in Golden Gate Park, to the Hippie
Funeral the following fall, held to signify the end of the unplanned
social experiment that drew thousands of kids to San Francisco.

Narrated by David Ogden Stiers, the film offers the usual dancing
hippies and talking heads, as well as the usual summary of why the
'60s happened: There were more people under 25 than ever before, some
90 million, and many of them had grown up in the relatively affluent
and placid '50s. As Peter Coyote puts it, dads went off to work, moms
stayed home, and kids were left to their own devices, in many cases.
Beneath the calm surface of the '50s, things were not quite so
perfect, though. Then the world broke open in the '60s. Kennedy was
killed, racial struggles heated up, Vietnam exploded.

What the filmmakers don't really explore adequately -- beyond the
overall subject of the film -- is how much the media itself
contributed to the explosive growth of the counterculture. The world
had broken open many times before, but what was different this time
wasn't just the undercurrent of tension building in the post-war
years, but that the emergence of the counterculture was there every
night on TV, as was the Vietnam "conflict," as that war was too
politely called. Kids in places where there were no hills would watch
the battle bodies carried out from distant jungles, and then see
reports of hippies painting their faces in San Francisco. When the
tribal gathering in Golden Gate Park happened, the images of fun and
freedom and sunshine caught the attention of college kids all over the
country.

That year, many came to San Francisco for spring break, crowding into
Haight Ashbury and spilling over into the nearby park. Some went back
to school, with plans to return to the city after the school year was
over. Others just stayed.

Some people just came for the drugs, concedes Mary Ellen Kasper, one
of the veterans of the Summer of Love interviewed for the film. But
others really believed the world could be simpler, that the world
could change, that, as Coyote puts it, "if you can act it out, it's
real." And that meant peace, brotherhood, kindness, charity. Concern
for spiritual values and deeper meaning became, for many kids, "more
important than the gross domestic product," says author Theodore Roszak.

Although San Francisco had always attracted outsiders, most recently
during the Beat movement in the '50s and early '60s, the impending
invasion of the city by thousands of Junior Hipsters, dubbed hippies,
terrified the media and city government. "Hippies Warn SF," screamed a
banner headline in The Chronicle.

But they came anyway and, for a time, there was a kind of magic in the
air, and it wasn't just sweet-smelling smoke. The Diggers formed to
make sure everyone got free food, and there was even a Free Store
where you could get anything you needed at no cost, and where people
brought things they no longer needed.

The music changed radically. As Chronicle Senior Pop Music Critic Joel
Selvin says, before the dawn of the Grateful Dead, a rock song was
three minutes, and that was it. Enter Jerry Garcia and Co., tripping
on acid, as were their audiences, and all of a sudden, the music went
on and on and on, great, glorious, roller-coastering riffs. The
soundtrack for a generation, or at least for a summer.

The dream ended almost as soon as it began, though. Drugs were part of
the reason. Some people began to experience bad trips on LSD, others
became hooked on more addictive substances that were flooding the
Haight and the hippie community. There wasn't enough food and, despite
the establishment of the Free Clinic, illness, STDs and overdoses festered.

And, too, seasons change, as the song says. Summer ended and a lot of
kids just left and went back to school. That rather pedestrian reality
had a lot to do with why the Boomer Brigadoon evaporated so quickly.

For "American Experience," and for the filmmakers of "Daughter From
Danang," "Summer of Love" is disappointing. It's fairly superficial,
doesn't add much that hasn't been covered before, and, most of all,
doesn't really work to tell us if any of it meant anything. Maybe, in
the end, it didn't mean anything, but even that theme should have been
worth a more thoughtful examination.